The spiritual unconscious is the source of our aesthetic sense, our capacity to laugh and to love, and many more qualities with which human beings are uniquely endowed. Among these qualities is conscience, and as an aspect of our spiritual being, it is essentially unconscious.
What does it mean for conscience to be ‘unconscious?’ It means that you are not spending time consciously reflecting on what you should do; your response is immediate and comes from an intuitive sense.
For example, recipients of the Carnegie Hero Fund, like the woman who jumped a fence to help another woman being charged by a bull or the man who saved another man from an oncoming train were not able to later give a logical explanation to why they did what they did. All they could say was: “I saw someone in dire straits. I was there. I could help. So I did.”
Does the irrationality of conscience make it a kind of instinct? Just as we have biological instincts, perhaps we have an ‘ethical instinct!’
Frankl insists that conscience is not an instinct. Acts of conscience may share certain things in common with instincts, but in one critically important respect they differ.
Instinctual responses follow a pre-programmed, consistent pattern. Conscience responds neither consistently nor predictably, because life is dynamic and changing situations require unique responses.
Frankl explains: “Only conscience is capable of adjusting the ‘eternal,’ generally agreed-upon moral law to the specific situation a concrete person is engaged in. Living one’s conscience always means living on a highly personalized level, aware of the full concreteness of each situation. (p. 36)
Listening carefully to Frankl’s words we can hear three aspects to awareness:
a) noticing/paying attention to what’s going on around us
b) being self-aware and engaged in what’s happening
c) knowing what kind of response is appropriate.
These three factors make up the meaning of the situation. To know what the situation means we have to pay attention. A man can “observe” that his wife has not made dinner, and react by screaming at her. That’s not called paying attention.
Paying attention means discerning, interpreting, evaluating and deciding. Why is the person in front of me acting this way? How does she feel and what does she need? What future possibilities can I foresee? What positive transformation can I anticipate and envision?
It is true, as Frankl explains, that not everyone responds the same way because no two situations are alike. Yet it is also true that not everyone responds the same way because not everyone is equally aware.
Not everyone will jump over a fence where a bull is waiting or go into a car engulfed in flames to save lives, but some people will. Not everyone hid adults and children from the Nazis during WWII but some people did.
If conscience were an instinct, we could expect the same response from anyone who was standing there, and there would be nothing heroic about an act that anyone could be expected to do. An act is only called heroic or altruistic when it is unexpected, when it comes from conscience.
A couple of examples of unconscious knowing are an emergency room nurse who makes a quick intuitive assessment of who should be treated first or a teacher who, seeing a child’s potential knows how to move him forward. One such teacher is sending his own child for music lessons with my son today.
Unconscious awareness is still called awareness. It cannot be explained using rational terms yet it constitutes an alternative channel of awareness.